It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 261.

Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego. And every twenty pages the story steps outside for a cigarette so that the author can deliver a short philosophical homily.

Once Adela had discovered from Gerald that I had no parents or any family at all, I was invited to their house repeatedly, indeed constantly and I could wish now, said Austerlitz, to have vanished without a trace in the peace that always reigned there.Sebald, Austerlitz, 111.

File 1.40

The Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, has been controversial ever since it was first included in the Bible. It has been given a thousand and more readings, and divined to promise a thousand and more Jerusalems on earth. Exegesis has endowed it with mystical depths of great historical importance. But all the hermeneutics have clouded the literal story the book tells, and it is from this perspective that it becomes acutely troubling in modern times. This inaugural document of hallucinated triumphalism with its vision of righteous war, now informs world leaders' outlook and strategy. [...] The political uses of the book today have shifted from personal illumination to religious "revelation" as a warranty for violence, and a remodelled concept of retributive justice.Marina Warner, TLS August 19 2005, 14.

Geier dares to "understand Heidegger without having to love him" as he says. "I didn't really take a liking to him, but I was able to grasp the concept of his life. It summarises rather easily: Heidegger rose from humble beginnings, and as a thinker strives towards the greatest." This is the simple secret of his entire philosophy which evinces a proclivity for monumentalism. "This narcissistic self-inflation has led to a flirtation with the greatness projected by national socialism."